Pains, Hungers, Emotions
4.3 EMOTIONS ARE A KIND OF APPETITE, BUT LACK OBJECTS
The implications of hyperbolic discounting free us from the need to invoke conditioning, and not only in the case of pain. Through the simple mechanism of seduction by short-range rewards, most of what motivates people in modern society – the huge category of appetite (hungers and emotions) – can be understood as motivated in turn, and subject to constraints that are altogether different from the releasing stimuli that conventional utility theory imagines. I’ll return to this dis- cussion several times; first, it will help to point out the essential same- ness of hungers and emotions and their continuity with motives in general.
As named in common speech, emotions are a vast and heterogeneous array of experiences, ranging from three or four basic processes (fear, lust, and anger at least) that are governed by identifiable neuronal processes and are discernible in lower animals (the “core emotions”), through perhaps a dozen characteristic processes like joy and contempt that do not have an identified physiology but that are named in many cultures and are recognizable in photographs of faces from other cultures (call the additional processes “stereotyped emotions”), to potentially scores of subtle mood states like envy and irony that are identified mainly by describing the situations that elicit them and are apt to be peculiar to one culture or historic period (call the additional processes “subtle emotions”).20 Hungers are fewer, and are named by a stimulus that they move you to “consume” – food, warmth, a drug.
There are two conspicuous differences between hungers and emotions: 1. Hungers are more obviously controlled by the deprivation or supply of specific concrete stimuli. Even so, hungers for specific objects are extensively influenced by learned processes called “tastes” and thus have some of the culture specificity typical of emotions. To develop a taste for yak butter or blubber, you must learn to associate their fatty flavor with satisfaction; to develop a taste for an abused substance, you must come to associate the chemical taste of alcohol or the disgust and nausea of heroin injection with the euphoria of the high.
consumption phase. Anger, for instance, may or may not demand venge- ance; lust is just as often called a hunger as an emotion, and may be entertained for its own sake when there’s no opportunity for physical gratification.
Hungers otherwise resemble emotions so extensively that an observer new to the topic would conclude that they are the same but for the hap- penstance of stimulus controllability. Jon Elster has reached a similar conclusion about emotions and the hungers that arise from addictions. He notes two differences: Addictions usurp the brain mechanisms that serve natural hungers (and perhaps emotions); and addictions are less “belief-dependent” than emotions, which seems to be another way of saying that they depend on concrete stimuli, the feature that I just called the defining characteristic of hungers generally.21
“Appetites” is probably the best word for hungers and emotions to- gether, although it presumes an essential similarity that common speech doesn’t recognize. Appetites seem to serve as a preliminary stage for some consumption modalities – like food, sex and drugs, and, when the preliminary stage is anxiety, pain. When the preliminary stage prepares for pleasure, appetites are the same thing as hungers. For emotions, appetite is arguably the only stage. Grief and joy lack a subsequent con- sumption phase. I’ll speak of both hungers and emotions as appetites except where that particular distinction is important; in that case, I’ll speak of hungers or emotions.22
Not only is the line between emotions and other appetites indistinct, so is the line between appetites and other reasons to seek or avoid things. Experts’ lists of emotions differ enormously in extent and shade into what most people would call ordinary motives. Acting in fear of imminent death is accompanied by different physiological processes than acting for fear of looking sloppy, but is there any distinct point on the continuum between them where the fear ceases to be an emotion and becomes just a figure of speech for a motive? Is envy a special men- tal process or just a particular category of perceived want? What about curiosity?
The word “emotion” merely implies something that moves us, as if some of our behaviors were unmoved. But as we’ve just seen, it’s likely that all behaviors are “motivated” – another word meaning moved. The only distinction between emotions and other motives seems to be their conspicuousness – some intensity or innate regularity that makes us no- tice them often enough to give them names. It looks as though the word
“emotion” is to motivational science what the word “hill” is to topog- raphy: an identifiable feature that stands out from a less prominent back- ground, but is made of the same stuff and may or may not be named as a unique feature, at the convenience of the observer. For purists, “emo- tion” is more like the word “mountain”; that is, purists demand greater contrast with ordinary motives before they’ll use a special term, but they face the same problem of where in the foothills to put the boundary.
David Hume noticed this essential continuity 250 years ago: Now it is certain there are certain calm desires and tendencies, which, though they be real passions, produce little emotion in the mind, and are more known by their effects than by the immediate feeling or sensation. . . . When any of these passions are calm, and cause no disorder in the soul, they are very readily taken for the determinations of reason.23
4.3.1 Appetites Are Behaviors
Now we can return to my argument that seemingly involuntary pro- cesses, not just aversiveness but hungers and emotions generally, come from a particular time relationship of rewards, making them forms of seduction. The distinction between the desirable (chosen even at a distance) and the merely reward dependent is important because many theories, both scientific and commonsense, blame subjectively unwanted behaviors on unmotivated processes like the supposed mechanism of classical conditioning.
In Chapter 2 I pointed out why conditioning couldn’t cause pleasure- seeking impulses (Section 2.2.1), but it has still seemed necessary as a way of imposing aversive experiences. If reward is defined narrowly as pleasure, some such mechanism seems indispensable; otherwise, what would make you pay attention to pain or entertain distressing emo- tions? With the recognition that very short-acting rewards can make what are on the whole aversive processes hard to resist, a much more parsimonious assumption becomes possible: that all substitutable behav- iors and the mental processes that govern them are chosen strictly on the basis of their prospective results, that is, on the basis of the process I’ve been calling reward. All hypothetical prior causes that control behaviors in reflexive fashion (i.e., by pushing) turn out to be unnecessary.24
That is, the short-range rewards created by hyperbolic discounting provide a way around the need for a second selective factor to explain seemingly involuntary mental processes. In the two-factor theory of
conditioning that I described earlier (Section 2.2.1), appetites must be elicited by stimuli that are outside of the person’s control. If that the- ory’s two assumptions about simple transferability of responses and about exponential discounting were true, the external-elicitation feature would be both possible and necessary. It would be possible because transfer- ability implies that appetites are special kinds of processes that initially depend on innate releasing stimuli but can come to be elicited by arbi- trary cues through pairing alone. It would be necessary, at least in the case of aversive appetites, because with conventional exponential dis- counting there is no other mechanism to make a person experience them. The easiest cure for fear would be to dismiss it – to stick your head in the sand – unless fear had peremptory control of your attention.
However, as we’ve seen (Section 2.2.1), the best evidence is that re- sponses can’t simply be transferred to new stimuli by pairing and that discounting is hyperbolic. Conversely, the short-range reward created by hyperbolic discounting offers a mechanism by which not only pain, but also panic and other emotions, hunger and other appetites, indeed all seemingly involuntary and sometimes undesirable mental processes can compete with pleasurable alternatives. The spikes on Figure 3 may depict the “hook,” not only of pains, but of panic, rage, the rehearsal of grief, the urgings of hunger, or the pangs of unsatisfied craving. As with pains, a vivid feeling that’s hard to ignore is inextricably mixed with a variable inhibition of reward.
Thus a good case can be made that appetites are behaviors – not voluntary, of course, but still goal-directed, shaped by (1) the increase in reward we get from consuming something with appetite versus without it or (2) an innate rewarding property of the appetite itself, in the same way that I suggested pain was innately seductive. Likewise, the stimuli that provoke appetites aren’t turnkeys for some innate lock, but occasions that have been selected for their usefulness in predicting when the appetites will be differentially rewarding. Although it’s usu- ally hard to dissect apart the sequence of deprivation-leading-to- appetite-leading-to-consumption, it can sometimes be observed that deprivation leads to hunger only when hunger has some likelihood of leading to consumption.
People can learn to get hungry just when food is available, for instance at mealtimes. When food is never available, that is, under starvation con- ditions, people learn to avoid generating appetite entirely. Sailors learn not to crave cigarettes when the “smoking light” is not lit, and many
Orthodox Jews report no urge to smoke on the Sabbath, even though their level of deprivation would support a strong appetite. The same reward responsiveness has been observed for craving in opiate addicts in a program where opiates are available for consumption only on certain days; addicts have even been reported not to have withdrawal symp- toms in a program where such symptoms are punished. Jon Elster has noted that “cravings are not only cue-dependent and belief-dependent [dependent on the belief that satisfaction is available], but ‘cost- dependent.’” This practical property
is also true of the more purely visceral urge to urinate, which may sub- side when there is no conventionally accepted way of relieving it and then intensify very rapidly when the agent knows that there will soon be an occasion to do so.25
It’s certainly hard to think of hungers as goal-directed behaviors when those that don’t seem to be rewarding in their own right may fail to ex- tinguish after hundreds of occurrences where they weren’t followed by their object. However, the arithmetic is probably no different than for a dog that wants to be fed. Begging is cheap compared to the value of the actual reward, and seems to be worth it even if food is almost never forthcoming at that time of day. Similarly, it’s beyond most people’s pa- tience to convert an outdoor pet to an indoor pet: The sight of someone going out arouses the desire even after months of failure. So it seems to be with hungers as slight hopes appear.
Emotions, which aren’t limited by the availability of consumption goods, are also experienced as involuntary. A discussion of what does limit them will have to wait until later (Section 10.1).26Here I’ll note only that some features in common with voluntary behaviors suggest that they’re ultimately reward-dependent – pulled, not pushed: Elster, who believes they’re not reward-dependent, nevertheless points out that they can be fostered by cultivating dispositions for them, induced by thought alone, and deliberately aborted, and furthermore that we may sometimes feel guilty for having them, as if they had been delib- erately chosen.27
4.4 SUMMARY
The temporary preferences caused by hyperbolic discounting are apt to be experienced differently, depending on their durations. Their most
obvious manifestation is in activities that are strongly preferred for periods of minutes to days, but just as strongly feared in advance and regretted afterward. These are the thrills, only sometimes drug-based, that are preferred in what I call the addiction range of duration. Longer preferences have an avoidance phase that’s less robust and are often experienced as compulsions. Preferences lasting only seconds are felt as urges (itches in my terminology) and are not usually desirable but still motivate participation. I hypothesize that still shorter urges that cycle rapidly reward only attention, not motor participation; this could explain why pains are vivid but aversive, and seduce you in a way that you can sometimes resist. These time ranges of temporary preference, along with consistent preference, shape five experientially distinct kinds of interest that compete for dominance in a motivational marketplace within each individual.
This model differentiates pleasures from the larger category called rewards, short-acting examples of which can lure you into decidedly unpleasurable activities. The concept of very briefly preferred rewards can explain many subjectively involuntary processes without resorting to dubious second principles of selection like classical conditioning. Such processes include not only physical pain, but also hungers (including cravings) and emotions, which seem to be members of a common cat- egory that I call appetites.